The other day, a woman gave me the business over my lack of enthusiasm for the new Star Wars movie. When she told me about how she was going to the first night, I said I had saw the original three, but skipped the reboot. I may have caught clips here and there, but otherwise I had no interest and I have no interest in the latest rendition. When I called it cowboys and Indians in space, I seemed to have crossed some line.

In his latest transmission, John Derbyshire takes a similar position, but for a different reason and probably a better reason than I offered. John grew up reading classic science fiction so he knows good sci-fi and Star Wars is just crap by comparison. I agree with that and I would add that Star Trek, the original version, is the gold standard for Hollywood science fiction.

Way back when Star Wars came out in the late 70’s, it was largely considered a kids movie. The adult sci-fi weirdos were into Star Trek, with the first convention happening in 1972. Guys spending Saturday night playing Dungeons and Dragons or learning to code on their Commodore PET were doing so wearing Spock ears, not fondling a fake light saber.

But we now live in the age of the fake nerd and I think that’s where Star Wars fits best. The people that “fucking love science!” and watch Big Bang Theory can’t shut up about Star Wars. It’s another method to signal their membership in the cult of pseudo-scientism. They may never have made it past geometry in school, but they swear they grew up on comic books and were always a nerd.

Fake nerds are everywhere in the media these days. Jonah Goldberg is the one that always comes to mind when I think about this stuff. He has invested a lot of time casting himself as a bookish nerd-boy who grew up reading Batman comics and watching re-runs of Gilligan’s Island. Maybe it is true or maybe it is just clever marketing. You never can know for sure with people in the media.

In sports media, the fake nerd is everywhere because statistics are such a big part of sports. ESPN loves dressing up a millennial as a dork and having him rattle off numbers on TV. It’s often hilarious as the typical sports reporter is innumerate, barely able to count to ten without help. But, they dress them up as nerds anyway, figuring it is what the public expects.

Of course, turning science into a religion is why we have kooks like Bill Nye demanding to have skeptics thrown in prison. He’s a good reminder that you can be batshit crazy and still be able to design a decent toaster. The amusement park manager, Neil deGrasse Tyson, made it through a doctoral program, but found better money in peddling pseudo-scientific nonsense to rich people.

The funny thing about the fake nerd stuff is that real nerds are usually active people who enjoy the outdoors, playing sports and doing the sorts of things normal people do. I used to play hoops with a bunch of programmers. I know a few body builders who are engineers, one is a rocket scientist at NASA. In my experience, the highly numerate tend to be a little nuts and anything but nerdish.

Of course, the fake nerd stuff is just a pose. We live in an age of marvels where the technology is far outpacing most people’s ability to keep up. In that regard, our era has another striking resemblance to the late 19th and early 20th century, before the great wars. When Wells, Gernsbacker and Verne invented science fiction, it seemed as if science would conquer the human condition.

A century ago, to be thought of as smart you had to be a tinkerer and love what passed for science and technology at the time. Everyone was convinced that all the answers were just around around the corner and the pace of technology would only accelerate. Taylorism was the economics of its day and everyone that was thought to be intelligent was into science.

A big difference between then and now is that fake nerdism is probably filling the void where religion used to reside. A century ago, even the most empirically minded went to mass, just to keep up appearances. Today, no one believes in anything so everyone falls for everything. Slap the word “study” onto any batshit crazy idea and your fake nerd friends will be posting infographics about on their Facebook page.

In the previous episode of this endless series of posts, I explained my view of history as a random stagger. Societies move from one phase to another haphazardly, constrained by the choices of those who came before them. North Korea has the options it has due to the choices made by those of the previous generations. The decisions made today will constrain future generations.

Those decisions, however, don’t spring from thin air. The choices made by Kim Il-sung were for a reason and that reason was to address a problem. The organization of his political party, for example, was about solving problems that Kim and his people were facing. Like all solutions, they were trade-offs. As is always the case with good commies, Kim let the debit side of the trade-off fall on his people, while he kept the credit side.

Everything around us, the political institutions, the laws, the customs, etc., all evolved to address the immediate needs of society and the desires of the people in charge of society. There’s not a single punctuation mark in the legal code that is not there for a reason. Every jot and tittle in the regulatory code has a constituency behind it that wanted it in the code to fix a problem for them.

The temptation is to point at these things and dismisses them as corruption, greed or ideological lunacy. Even when that is true, self-dealing solves a problem for the political elites doing the dealing. The modern Democrat party shovels money to public sector unions because it is good for the party. The unions use those funds to elect Democrats, who in turn shovel them move money. From their point of view, it is the perfect solution.

Even the ideological stuff is done to address what the ideologues see as a pressing need. FDR and the New Dealers rolled out the welfare state because they truly feared popular unrest due to the Depression. They thought social security was a great solution to the problems of old age. They thought the Wagner Act would help stabilize labor and prevent the sorts of radicalization they saw in Europe.

Thus the world into which all of us were born is a world populated with solutions to problems. Some are cultural institutions like churches and social customs. Others are in the political economy of society. Government, the legal structure of every society, was created and evolved as a solution to the problems of how to best organize and rule society.

Of course, many of those problems were long solved and the lingering solutions no longer seem to have a justification. This is where Progressives get into trouble. They swing the wrecking ball without wondering why the thing they intend to destroy was created. In the 1980’s, America emptied out the lunatic asylums because lefty felt bad for the crazies. Ever since, American cities have had a “homeless problem.”

Then there are problems that have been truly solved. In America, food shortages have been solved and now the poor are fat, while the rich are skinny. Despite the abundance of cheap calories available to everyone, we still have food subsidy programs for the poor and farm subsidy programs for farmers. Billions are taken from tax payers, given to rich farmers and fat people so the rich farmers can sell the fat people cheap food.

Every year, sensible people propose that we spend public funds on new problems, but the cost of farm subsidies for rich people and food programs for the fat people means there’s not enough money for the new solutions.We kick a lot of cans down the road in order to avoid unwinding unneeded solutions to long solved problems.

Even though we have long blown past the point where the returns turned negative, the perceived costs of rolling back these old solutions exceeds the benefits. As a result, they keep rolling along, becoming ever more draining on society. Many public policy solutions take us down a cul-de-sac.

The most well known example of this is the Roman Empire. Early conquests had huge returns that more than paid for the cost of gaining them. That meant new conquests were the obvious solution to adding to the wealth of Rome.

That made sense up to the point where the costs of new conquests exceeded what the Romans could loot form the newly conquered people. By the time of Augustus, expanding the Empire further simply made no sense, because the cost of conquering more barbarians exceeded the benefits.

The trouble for the Romans was the ongoing cost to past conquest. Those conquered lands had to remain conquered. The frontiers had to be guarded and that meant paying for legions to fight the barbarians. Administering an an empire had costs as well. Roads had to be built, army officers bribed, dissent suppressed. The on-going costs of maintaining the empire eventually hollowed it out, leading to collapse.

An example of how culture can become a suicide vest can be found with the Celts. They had a tradition of burying their dead leaders with their wealth. New leaders acquired their own wealth, which created a meritocracy of sorts. To become a great Celtic leader, you had to be good at war and peace so you could gain great wealth for yourself and your people.

The trouble was, destroying that wealth on the death of the ruler made it harder for each generation to acquire gold, silver, precious gems, etc. Eventually, the number of people seeking gold far exceeded the amount available in Celtic lands. Historians believe this led to the collapse of Celtic society and the Celtic invasions.

That’s fundamentally why companies fail, revolutions topple governments and empires collapse.The cost of the status quo becomes untenable, but the cost of reform is also untenable. The business cannot reorganize, the elites cannot reform and the empire cannot downsize. The only “solution” left is liquidation, a clearing off all the old solutions and their costs. A clean start.

At a nation level, revolution is just bankruptcy with more theater. The revolutionaries seize the public assets of society, liquidate them and start over with a clean sheet of paper. What is useful is retained, but all obligations are voided. The whole point of a revolution is to wipe away all those old solutions, which are viewed as mistakes and burdens, so the people can have a fresh start.

The crisis faced by the West is not just the wave of migrants or the mountains of debt. Those are easily solved. The crisis is caused by the overhang of old solutions to old problems. Angela Merkel is the answer to a question posed thirty years ago, one no one asks anymore, because we have new questions to answer, like how to keep Mohamed from self-detonating in Europe.

What comes next, what always follows a economic revolution, is a massive political reorganization. Maybe this time it is collapse under a wave of flea infested migrants from the south. Maybe the popular uprisings in response to the flood of migrants will usher in a clearing of the debts. Maybe the Germans will stop apologizing for Hitler and Southerners will stop apologizing for slavery.

Here is the late great Tony Snow’s legendary column on Kwanzaa:

BLACKS IN AMERICA have suffered an endless series of insults and degradations, the latest of which goes by the name of Kwanzaa.

Ron Karenga (aka Dr. Maulana Ron Karenga) invented the seven-day feast (Dec. 26-Jan. 1) in 1966, branding it a black alternative to Christmas. The idea was to celebrate the end of what he considered the Christmas-season exploitation of African Americans.

According to the official Kwanzaa Web site — as opposed, say, to the Hallmark Cards Kwanzaa site — the celebration was designed to foster “conditions that would enhance the revolutionary social change for the masses of Black Americans” and provide a “reassessment, reclaiming, recommitment, remembrance, retrieval, resumption, resurrection and rejuvenation of those principles (Way of Life) utilized by Black Americans’ ancestors.”

Karenga postulated seven principles: unity, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity and faith, each of which gets its day during Kwanzaa week. He and his votaries also crafted a flag of black nationalism and a pledge: “We pledge allegiance to the red, black, and green, our flag, the symbol of our eternal struggle, and to the land we must obtain; one nation of black people, with one G-d of us all, totally united in the struggle, for black love, black freedom, and black self-determination.”

Now, the point: There is no part of Kwanzaa that is not fraudulent. Begin with the name. The celebration comes from the Swahili term “matunda yakwanza,” or “first fruit,” and the festival’s trappings have Swahili names — such as “ujima” for “collective work and responsibility” or “muhindi,” which are ears of corn celebrants set aside for each child in a family.

Unfortunately, Swahili has little relevance for American blacks. Most slaves were ripped from the shores of West Africa. Swahili is an East African tongue.

To put that in perspective, the cultural gap between Senegal and Kenya is as dramatic as the chasm that separates, say, London and Tehran. Imagine singing “G-d Save the Queen” in Farsi, and you grasp the enormity of the gaffe.

Worse, Kwanzaa ceremonies have no discernible African roots. No culture on earth celebrates a harvesting ritual in December, for instance, and the implicit pledges about human dignity don’t necessarily jibe with such still-common practices as female circumcision and polygamy. The inventors of Kwanzaa weren’t promoting a return to roots; they were shilling for Marxism. They even appropriated the term “ujima,” which Julius Nyrere cited when he uprooted tens of thousands of Tanzanians and shipped them forcibly to collective farms, where they proved more adept at cultivating misery than banishing hunger.

Even the rituals using corn don’t fit. Corn isn’t indigenous to Africa. Mexican Indians developed it, and the crop was carried worldwide by white colonialists.

The fact is, there is no Ur-African culture. The continent remains stubbornly tribal. Hutus and Tutsis still slaughter one another for sport.

Go to Kenya, where I taught briefly as a young man, and you’ll see endless hostility between Kikuyu, Luo, Luhya and Masai. Even South African politics these days have more to do with tribal animosities than ideological differences.

Moreover, chaos too often prevails over order. Warlords hold sway in Somalia, Eritrea, Liberia and Zaire. Genocidal maniacs have wiped out millions in Rwanda, Uganda and Ethiopia. The once-shining hopes for Kenya have vanished.

Detroit native Keith Richburg writes in his extraordinary book, “Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa,” that “this strange place defies even the staunchest of optimists; it drains you of hope …”

Richburg, who served for three years as the African bureau chief for The Washington Post, offers a challenge for the likes of Karenga: “Talk to me about Africa and my black roots and my kinship with my African brothers and I’ll throw it back in your face, and then I’ll rub your nose in the images of rotting flesh.”

His book concludes: “I have been here, and I have seen — and frankly, I want no part of it. …. By an accident of birth, I am a black man born in America, and everything I am today — my culture and my attitudes, my sensibilities, loves and desires — derives from that one simple and irrefutable fact.”

Nobody ever ennobled a people with a lie or restored stolen dignity through fraud. Kwanzaa is the ultimate chump holiday — Jim Crow with a false and festive wardrobe. It praises practices — “cooperative economics, and collective work and responsibility” — that have succeeded nowhere on earth and would mire American blacks in endless backwardness.

Our treatment of Kwanzaa provides a revealing sign of how far we have yet to travel on the road to reconciliation. The white establishment has thrown in with it, not just to cash in on the business, but to patronize black activists and shut them up.

This year, President Clinton signed his fourth Kwanzaa proclamation. He crooned: “The symbols and ceremony of Kwanzaa, evoking the rich history and heritage of African Americans, remind us that our nation draws much of its strength from our diversity.”

But our strength, as Richburg points out, comes from real principles: tolerance, brotherhood, hard work, personal responsibility, equality before the law. If Americans really cared about racial healing, they would focus on those ideas — and not on a made-up rite that mistakes segregationism for spirituality and fiction for history.

Over the last decade or so, I’ve lost interest in debating my Progressive friends on most everything. I’ll torment them when the opportunity arises or subtly mock them by appearing to go along with their latest crackpottery, but I avoid getting into anything resembling a serious debate with them. There’s simply no point. I’d have more luck debating an astrologer.

The astrologer, at least, understands that their thing is bullshit. People into the black arts willingly admit to being into magic and they never pretend otherwise. Some astrologers, I suppose, come close to making claims to science, but they never hide the magical bits at the core. Instead, they believe the stars determine our fate in some magical way that can be discovered. It’s kooky, but they don’t pretend it is real science and it is basically harmless.

Hang around Lefty for any length of time and you inevitably bump up against what can only be labeled as magical thinking. There’s an old gag in engineering where you have a flow chart describing all the inputs pointing to a box labeled “something magical happens” which then leads to the desired output. The modern Progressive orthodoxy is shot through with some version of this, usually dressed up with “studies” that read like astrological charts.

I’ve visited this topic in the past, but it seems like a good time to catalog the various forms of magic floating around the Cult. As the load bearing walls of the ruling class show signs of distress, magical thinking is breaking out all over so keeping up on the latest spells and incantations is probably a good idea. That and it allows me to let my hair down and say horrible things about Progressives.

And I’ve started drinking earlier than usual.

The most obvious example of magical thinking is gun control. The Cult is out shaking their staffs at the heavens now, demanding special ceremonies to make the guns stop shooting people. The way to do that, they claim, is to go hassle some white guys in the suburbs who like to hunt and shoot paper targets. Somehow, that’s going to stop Farouk and Jamal from shooting up their neighborhood.

The thing about gun control is that ultimately it is based on the belief that shaping a piece of metal or plastic in a certain way imbues it with magical powers. The “studies” they wave about claim that the mere presence of a gun shaped object causes otherwise sane people to commit suicide, shoot their old lady, rob a liquor store and now, go on Jihad at the local municipal building.

Magic Shape Theory is just one facet of the Progressive amulet. The guy holding the amulet right now is the world’s greatest example of Magic Negro Theory. Back in 2008, the Cult of Modern Liberalism assured us that the sins of the past could be washed from the soul of the nation by putting a black guy in charge. Even though he spoke mostly in gibberish and had yet to show he could run anything more complicated than his yap, he was our savior.

Sadly, we did not have a Pontius Pilate handy (or a Sirhan Sirhan) so we got Barak the Magic Negro who promised:

“I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth.”

There’s political rhetoric and then there are incantations and prophesies. Promising two cars in every garage and a chicken in every pot is standard political rhetoric. Promising to alter physical reality is the sort of thing people claiming to be warlocks say just before they are carried off to the asylum or, preferably, thrown off a cliff. Not only did the people voting for this ninny believe he was magic; Obama believed he was magic.

The most famous form of magic floating around today is Magic Dirt Theory. Put that phrase in a google machine and out comes 496,000 references. In the whole wide interwebs, that’s not a lot, relatively speaking, but it is not a little either. The fact that the phrase alone could enter the mainstream so easily makes clear it is not just a throw away line. It’s a real thing, at least in the minds of the believers.

For the unaware, Magic Dirt Theory claims that the soil alters behavior. Place a bunch of Bantus in Paris and they magically transform into Frenchmen. Round up residents of your typical inner city, set them up in suburbia and they become the Cleavers, just without all the honky-ism and white privilege. They will quit gang-banging, get jobs, pay taxes and join the Rotary Club.

In the ongoing crisis, it’s tempting to think that belief in magic is new or just a last gasp, but magic has always been a central part of the Cult of Modern Liberalism. Decades ago, moonbats were convinced that if they affixed a Darwin Fish to their Subaru, it would turn the vehicle’s occupants into scientists. Back in the day, the surest way to spot the innumerate was to look for the Darwin Fish.

At the time, people who should have known better dismissed it as mere signalling. The people displaying these things were letting us know they were in the cult of secular humanism. Remember that one? People used to wear shirts claiming they were secular humanists.

Anyway, that’s exactly the point of a magic talisman. It is a signal to the evil spirits that the wearer is protected by strong juju. Instead of warding off Satan, the Darwin Fish people were using magic symbols to ward off Christians.

Today, the hip and groovy thing to do is to let everyone know you love Gaia by carrying grimy canvas sacks with you to the grocery store. The people doing this believe the grimy sacks create a force field around them repelling deniers who want to kill Mother Earth with their lawnmower. If enough believers carry the grimy sacks with them, Mother Earth will be protected from the bad men.

You can’t have a decent cult without a collection of abracadabra words, the incantations that expose the evil doers in your ranks, give strength to the faithful and diminish the power of the enemies. In modern America, there’s no word more potent than “racist” and its use has the power to slay dragons. Theodore Dalrymple wrote a nice column on how even non-believers can use the power of the R-word to destroy the wicked.

Anti-racism has become the philosopher’s stone of the Cult of Modern Liberalism. It’s not just a weapon, used to melt the faces off of enemies like the Arc in Raiders. The faithful truly believe that once they purge society of racism, the skies will open up and bliss will rain down on mankind, bringing about the eschaton. This is no different from the Puritans believing their purpose in life was to rid their communities of sin and sinners.

One way to purge the world of sinners is through the magic of diversity. Filling up your neighborhood with people not like you is the one sure way bring about the eschaton. If you doubt this, well, you’re probably related to Hitler. Everyone believes diversity is good, because science! and because it is. It just is and if you disagree, well, maybe you should find somewhere else to live.

Before we had the wonderfulness of diversity, we had tolerance, which was this thing that drove away the people the tolerant simply could not tolerate. Similarly, diversity is this thing where everyone is welcome to celebrate their culture, unless they are white and from a culture that has something to celebrate. Diversity promises to magically lift us all to the heavens by pulling the roof down on Western Civilization.

But who doesn’t believe in magic?

If you have been reading this blog for any length of time, you know I’m ambivalent about Trump as a candidate. I’m enjoying the Trump Effect, but I’m not a Trump fan. I don’t hate the guy or have any strong feelings about him one way or the other. I’m just not a fan of his personal style and I have a tough time imagining him as president. Therefore, I have not thought much about him being president.

Watching the press go nuts over Donald’s schlong, er…Trump’s use of the idiomatic expression “schlonged” with regards to Hillary Clinton, I’m pretty close to convinced that Trump is not only going to win the nomination. He is going to be the next president. You can’t be this clever by accident. Sure, some gaffes turn out to work in your favor, but this guy is playing the press like a fiddle. This schlong business smacks of showing off.

Think about it. He uses an odd term that has been used by liberal media outlets like NPR and the NYTimes. That term has a sexual connotation to most people. He uses it on Hillary Clinton. His enemies immediately assume he means something vulgar, but narrative collapse kicks in and we end the cycle by talking about how Clinton’s husband is a rapist. That’s super villain clever and Trump does it regularly.

It’s pretty clear by now that Trump has a solid base of support. The remarkable thing about Trumps’s polling in 2015 is the consistency. Poll after poll, pollster after pollster comes up with the same steady climb higher and higher. He started the year around 10% and is going to finish the year at 40%. No other candidate has had this steady rise in the polls, not even Hillary Clinton.

What has not been so clear, largely because Republican media has been flooding the zone with wishful thinking, is that the Trump vote has been splintered, split among several candidates. The GOP spin has played this the other way, claiming the establishment vote was split among a bunch of candidates, thus giving the illusion of a Trump lead in the polls. Once the minor figures drop out, the theory goes, the voters will coalesce around a party man and that would be it.

Yet, the math says otherwise. The latest CNN poll has Trump and 39% and Cruz at 18%. There’s no reason to think that the Cruz vote would go to an establishment figure. People supporting him hate the GOP just as much as the Trump supporters. That’s 57% of the vote. Carson, another outsider candidate is at 10% and it does seem that his vote is shifting to Trump and Cruz.

When 67% of the vote is going for candidates that exist as a rejection of the status quo, it is ridiculous to think that the remaining candidates will collapse into a unitary candidate and win the primary. Given that they are all equally weak, none of them are ready to quit and support the other so by the time a champion midget is crowned, it will probably be too late anyway.

My hunch is we are about to see the race transition into a new phase where the party establishment tries to salvage what they can from the wreckage. I’m not really sure how they can pull it off, but that seems to be the plan Cruz has been banking on for months. His act has been to avoid taking on Trump, letting the others take the beating while he lies low, waiting for his moment. My guess is he thinks his moment will be Iowa.

That sounds a like a great plan, but it assumes Cruz has not already hit the same ceiling we have seen over the past year with other candidates. They bubble up to about 18% and then start to decline again. It also assumes he can survive contact with Trump, something no one has done so far. In fact, the sign that your campaign is over has been when Donald Trump says your name.

I’m not making any predictions, but the way to bet right now is for Trump to be the nominee. He is schlonging Hillary Clinton right now, which will go a long way toward winning him converts in the GOP. Unless Cruz can handle the Trump schlong, he’s probably going to break on the wheel of Trump too.

Back in the summer, I predicted that The Weekly Standard crowd would head back over to the Democrats if Trump won the nomination. Privately Bill Kristol has been sounding out party big shots about how best to stop Trump. He has hinted at his own plan to bolt the party if Trump won the nomination.  Now the Hari Seldon of neo-conservatism has made it official.

On Monday, Weekly Standard editor-in-chief Bill Kristol tweeted out what the rest of the Republican establishment is thinking: better Hillary than Donald. Here’s the tweet:

Crowd-sourcing: Name of the new party we’ll have to start if Trump wins the GOP nomination? Suggestions welcome at editor@weeklystandard.com

— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) December 20, 2015

Kristol isn’t alone. As I wrote at Daily Wire today, Politico’s Jeff Greenfield says, “If the operatives I talked with are right, Trump running as a Republican could well face a third-party run – from the Republicans themselves.” That follows last Thursday’s Politico column from former New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman, who compared Trump to Hitler and called him “evil,” and last Wednesday’s Politico column reporting that Jeb Bush’s aides “began looking into the possibility of making a clear break with Trump – potentially with the candidate stating that, if Trump were the nominee, Bush would not support him.”

Last week, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough said that former Mississippi governor Haley Barbour “and a lot of the Republican leaders would much rather Hillary Clinton be President of the United States than have Donald Trump represent them as a Republican.” And in November, The Hill reported that “GOP establishment donors have confided to The Hill that for the first time in recent memory, they find themselves contemplating not supporting a Republican nominee for president.”

I’m old enough to remember when it was scandalous for Trump not to pledge his allegiance to the eventual Republican nominee. Now, day after day, reports from party leaders leak, stating that should Trump gain control over the party apparatus, they will simply smash the machinery.

Four months ago the same characters now planning to bolt the party made Thanks Dad and The Tart hold a loyalty oath on TV, allegedly to show that Trump was an unreliable splitter and deviationist. For months National Review On-Line has been running daily columns claiming that Trump was not a real Republican because he could bolt the party at anytime. I’m looking forward to Rich Lowry lecturing Bill Kristol about his lack of loyalty.

Despite all the cheerleading for Team GOP and conservatism, these guys were never on our side. Neo-conservatism was always a Progressive heresy, not a conservative one. That’s where the paleocons got it wrong. They saw guys like Bill Kristol as newly minted converts trying to get control of the movement. The reality is the neo-cons were trying to kill the conservative movement and they largely succeeded.

The trouble is, reality has always been on the side of conservatism. A sober (somber?) acceptance of the human condition is the the core of conservatism. The crackpot theories of the invade the word/invite the word crowd we call neocons were always going to break on the wheel of reality. The public will only tolerate so many Farouks shooting up their offices and they will only volunteer so many sons to foreign wars. We’ve reached the limit of both.

I was at a luncheon today with some old school lefties and what struck me was their weariness with their cult. They are sick of the weirdos and grievance mongers. They want to get back to bread and butter issues like defending the working classes against the predatory class and fixing up the country for Americans. They still think government is great, but I could tell they are edging close to ditching the Democrats and the social justice warriors.

This growing schism gets no airing as the cult controls the media, but liberals gotta eat too. You can be the most doctrinaire lefty in town, but when your health insurance jumps 30%, you get pissed at the people who caused it. The on-going crisis of national sovereignty and neo-feudal economics is eroding the old order. Old lefties and old righties have more in common with each other than they have with their so-called leaders.

There’s a long road between now and the time when we lock shelds against the cloud people. When the Hari Seldon of neo-conservatism is threatening to destroy one of the parties, it means the great realignment is not going to happen without a fight. Given that he and the Encyclopedists are the guys in charge, betting against them is probably foolish. But, that’s the fun part of realignments. You never know how they will turn out.

One of the more entertaining aspects of the genetic age is going to be how the Cult reconciles their love of science! with the fact science contradicts most of what they believe. Even funnier is how the soft sciences are finding their authority laughed out of the room by genetics.

Here’s a good example.

Genes which make people intelligent have been discovered and scientists believe they could be manipulated to boost brain power.

Researchers have believed for some time that intellect is inherited with studies suggesting that up to 75 per cent of IQ is genetic, and the rest down to environmental factors such as schooling and friendship groups.

But until now, nobody has been able to pin-point exactly which genes are responsible for better memory, attention, processing speed or reasoning skills.

Now Imperial College London has found that two networks of genes determine whether people are intelligent or not-so-bright.

They liken the gene network to a football team. When all the players are in the right positions, the brain appears to function optimally, leading to clarity of thought and what we think of as quickness or cleverness.

However when the genes are mutated or in the wrong order, it can lead to dullness of thinking, or even serious cognitive impairments.

Scientists believe that there must be a ‘master switch’ regulating the networks and if they could find it, they could ‘switch on’ intelligence for everyone.

My bet is most everyone reading this is familiar with graph paper. That’s the paper with the little boxes on it. Now, imagine yourself in a world  like that graph paper. You are in a room that has four walls and each wall has either a door, a window, or nothing at all. The plain walls range from impenetrable to fairly easy to bust through. You can go through the doors and windows or try to bust through the walls, but you just end up in another room that is a square on the grid. You don’t know what is in each room until you enter it.

Presented with such a puzzle. you could go exploring, looking for the route out of the maze. If I decided to make the game more fun for me and added some dangers in rooms, for example, then you would be a lot more cautious about seeing the other rooms. You might take a peak through the door before charging into the next room. I could go on, but you get the idea here I hope.

Even without me adding life threatening dangers to the puzzle, your way out of the maze would be trial and error with lots of backtracking. If in your first room you have two doors and those connecting rooms each have two doors, there are four possible outcomes. If those rooms have two doors then you have possible outcomes. It’s not hard to see how the number of possible outcomes can multiply quickly.

Now, imagine instead of a simple grid, the maze is like the gaming paper from the 70’s version of Dungeons and Dragons. That’s the hexagonal stuff. Instead of have four choices you now have six. That means your first choice has thirty possible outcomes. Multiply this out of a few moves and you see how quickly this puzzle becomes. Even after a few moves, you would struggle to retrace your steps without some sort of map.

That last bit is important to understand. Each decision you face is the result of previous decisions. If you make a bad move on step three, but only discover it at step nine, you have an accumulation of bad decisions to contend with before you can get back to the original error. That could be daunting enough to make going backward unrealistic.

The point of this thought experiment is to illustrate how complicated even simple decision trees can become after a few steps. Imagine that each move is decided by a committee that represents the interests of different groups. It’s not just deciding on which box to enter. It is how to decide if that choice was a good choice and then deciding where to go from there.

This is how societies evolve and develop. Even the most autocratic societies make decisions that depend on previous decisions. Kim Jung-un can only choose from the options available to him and those options are the result of decisions made long before he was born. It’s why analysis that relies on reductionism should always be dismissed. There’s no great design or plan from which the current actors are working. Every society is playing the hand it is dealt.

This may seem obvious, but analysts are often prone to reductionism, assuming groups are working like individuals. The most obvious example of methodological reductionism is the mythological Zionist conspiracy. Jews are often described as if they are working collectively from a game plan worked at out annual retreats. The reality is that Jews, like everyone else, are working within the constraints placed on them by history. Jews just happen to be smarter than everyone else, on average.

Going back to our puzzle analogy, imagine that instead of a puzzle you can transcend, the hexagon in which you and your tribe exist is where you have always lived, at least in your lifetime. Maybe some of the elders remember a time when your people lived in an adjacent hex. Perhaps your mythology and creation myths talk about some hex at the beginning that lies well beyond anyone’s ability to reach.

In other words, instead of a puzzle into which you were dropped, it is where you have always lived. To you and your people it is not a puzzle. You have no idea it is a puzzle because you lack the perspective to see it that way. Instead it is your world in the same way the tank is the world as far as the goldfish knows. Leaving the hex you are in for the adjacent hex is not in pursuit of the way out, because there is no way out.

Now, necessity from time to time will require you and maybe some others to pick up and explore an adjacent square. You have to try something new because the status quo becomes untenable or there is some hope that greater opportunity lies beyond the hex you currently occupy. Again, the options available to you and your clan are the result of similar decisions made in previous generations. History is a nightmare from which you can never awake

Societal evolution may be accretive, but it also happens in fits and starts. If you and everyone you knew were suddenly under some pressure to think about moving to the next hex, some of you could decide to go even further. The need for change opens up a range of choices that were previously off limits. If you’re going to make a change, why not a big change?

We see this in our own lives. When I was a boy, television was a a box in the living room and my father cursing on the roof, adjusting the antennae. I recall going with him to the hardware store so he could use the tester to determine which vacuum tubes were dead. In the blink of an eye, I can now watch TV on my mobile phone that has the processing power of the space shuttle.

The thing is, my experience with TV as a boy was not all that different from the previous generation’s experience. Kids in the decades after World War II had a consistent material life up into the 80’s and then things started to change rapidly with the microprocessor. The kids of today can’t imagine a world in the old hex of console television, rabbit ears and rooftop antennae.

Think about it. In the 1980’s the fax machine was a wizbang invention. By the last decade it was obsolete. A decade ago, tapping on a monochrome screen was cutting edge. Today no one remembers the Palm. At the same time, the telephone of 1950 was still in use in most homes in the 1980’s. We think the pace of change today will continue, but history says it will slow to a crawl for a while and then another period of rapid advance, long after we are dead.

The journey of a person, a tribe or a nation is just feeling around in the dark, mostly out of necessity, looking for a solution to current problems. There is no grand plan. The story of humanity in the aggregate and the particular is a random walk. Assigning motives beyond temporary necessity and accident, is reductionism, a structural error in thinking.

It is easy to read and learn about the beliefs of others when those beliefs have nothing to do with your beliefs. Reading about the beliefs of the ancient Greeks, for example, is fun because we know it is all nonsense and it in no way threatens our own beliefs about the world, natural and supernatural.

On the other hand, tune into the Democrat debate show last night and a normal person will struggle to not fly into a rage and throw the remote at the television. It’s not just the lies and nonsense all of the candidates are fond of saying in public. It’s the fact that all of these people believe things that are antithetical to what you believe and even who you are.

As a result, it is very hard to watch, listen and learn. I bet most normal people find it easier to read the pronouncements of ISIS than listen to Hillary Clinton. ISIS makes more sense. You can relate a little bit to what they are thinking and feeling. They want their culture and people to prosper. It’s crazy and violent, but not irrational. That’s not the case with the Democrats or the Republicans.

Anyway, I was thinking about that when this popped up on my twitter machine the other day. I started to read it, but felt coming over me that urge one associates with the smell of spoiled food. It’s the old reflex arch telling your body to get away from something foul. That’s not a habit I try to cultivate so I came back to it with a more clinical approach.

One of the habits I’ve developed is to look up the author of Progressive tirades. They have an odd habit of misrepresenting themselves. The smug sneering is always based in the mistaken belief they are super smart people. Look up their bio and you inevitably learn they were a poli-sci major at a state college. Alternatively, they hold a degree from a private school in a nonsense field like black studies or feminism.

In this case, Salon does some of the work for me:

“Sean Illing is a USAF veteran who very briefly taught political science at Loyola and LSU. He is currently a staff writer for Salon.”

I’m always suspicious of people who list their military service in their bio. This comes from my grandfather who said there are two types of people who wave around their service time. There are those who peaked during the war and those who are lying to you. My grandfather grew up with men who served under Grand Duke Nicholas so he was a little jaded. Still, it is something I have often observed in my own life.

The worst offenders, of course, are politicians. John McCain has been waving around his own bloody shirt for decades. Recently, female politicians have started listing “combat veteran” at the top of their bios, giving the impression they at one time hiked up their skirts, fixed bayonets and went over the top to face the Huns.

Sean Illing, according to his resume, is a fanatic who has struggled to hold a job and gets by writing these screeds for a tin foil hat website. That’s not disqualifying, but it makes it easier to read his posts knowing that he is struggling with reality. It’s why looking up the bio is a good tool for reading material produced by the Cult.

What you’ll notice about these guys is they truly believe the Great Liberal Pumpkin is about to rise from the Moonbat Patch and bring about the eschaton. I’ve been reading about the death of “old white men” for forty years now, at least. Back in the Reagan years this was a favorite of Progressives smarting over the rise of middle America. It’s where we got the phrase, “Angry White Males.”

What’s humorous about this is the people predicting the demise of old white people just assume they have escaped the march of time. Sean Illing, faster than he can imagine, will be an old white guy, hiding in his apartment from the gangs of brown people on the streets polar bear hunting.

The other thing that you always see when reading the industrial strength crackpots is the comical hive mindedness. For Sean, the world is a simple place. Inside the walls are the good thinkers. Outside the walls are the bad thinkers, an undifferentiated other about which he knows nothing, other than the fact they are on the other side of the wall. Bees stink indiscriminately for a reason.

If you’re reading this, most likely you are a crime thinker with a head full of hate facts. Despite your evilness, you have noticed that the people outside the Hive walls don’t get along with one another. There is a wide diversity of opinion outside the Hive, while inside it resembles a Hitler Youth camp.

One of the central insights of Steve Sailer is that the current Progressive coalition is way to fringe to hold together for much longer. A coalition of working class ethnics, blacks and rural whites has a lot in common. A coalition of deviants, criminals and the deranged is not a recipe for success. Sean Illing is functional, but you can’t count on guys like that to keep it together over the long haul.